Animal Spirits Podcast - Gold's 1987 Moment (EP. 450)

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

On episode 450 of Animal Spirits, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ��⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss the never-ending news cycle, the gold/silver crash, how the Internet changed markets forever, the commodities supercycle, emerging markets are on fire, the new Fed chair, the chart of the century, crypto feels dead again, the government doesn't want to build more homes for young people, DoorDash discourse and more. This episode is sponsored by Nuveen and ClearBridge Investments.  Invest like the future is watching. Visit https://www.nuveen.com/future to learn more. International and emerging market stocks outperformed the U.S. in 2025. At ClearBridge, we believe this momentum can continue. Find out more at  https://www.clearbridge.com/ Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find complete show notes on our blogs: Ben Carlson’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠A Wealth of Common Sense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Michael Batnick’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Irrelevant Investor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Feel free to shoot us an email at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Earnings growth in the rest of the equity market is forecast to catch up with the magnificent seven in 2026. Position your investment portfolio for an expected broadening in performance with fundamentally driven Clearbridge active equity strategies. Clearbridge, a Franklin Templeton company, go to Clearbridge.com to learn more. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about marketing. markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for

informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. It is Tuesday morning. 905 on the East Coast, and things are moving fast these days. Do you feel that way? Mm-hmm. The Internet has sped everything up, right? I don't know if it's the Internet, because we've, you know, Internet's better off.

Are you talking all, hey, it's February, right? Really? It's February? No, no, no, no. I mean, the news cycle. Yeah. Yes. So last week, or two weeks ago, when the Greenland sell-off happened, and it was a legitimate

sell-off. I mean, yeah, from all-time odds, and it wasn't like a deep drawdown or anything, but the market was down two percent. It was the worst day in months and months and months. And we spoke about it a little bit. Like this is nonsense, obviously. But then a week later, there was so much news to replace that news because I guess Trump, you know, de-escalated the rhetoric.

We didn't even revisit it because we didn't have time. Right. So the doc today is, let me pages. I mean, we're not going to get to it at all. The doc is 60-something pages, 57 pages. Might be a record. So here's some of the things that are in the news cycle this week. Some of them are-

We should just do a marathon. day. We go through it all. Some of them are outside the scope of what we normally talk about, but it's still things that are very much dominating the news. So the ICE stuff, obviously, that's not a topic for today's conversation, nor is the Epstein files, but that is like national news, right? Like everywhere. For our purposes, you've got all the stuff that's happening in AI, and this was a really crazy week with last week it was Claude, or a couple of weeks that was like all the dominant news flow. And then it was Claude Bot, which is a separate thing.

They renamed it Maltbod. If you're not familiar with what this company is, these are AI agents that, like, created their own Reddit board and are now talking amongst themselves. There is the gold and the silver and the crypto crash. We have a new Fed chairman coming in. SpaceX is taking over AI or SpaceX and XAI, excuse me, are merging. Open AI is fighting with Nvidia. Netflix is buying Warner Brothers Discovery.

Discovery. We have a new Disney CEO. And I'm sure there's other things that I'm not including. Like, of course there are, right? I didn't mention everything. And this is all in the middle of an earning season, like a very busy tech-based earning season. There is so much happening. I feel like we're drowning in news flow. You just explained like 10 days. I want to like, you zoomed in a little. I want to zoom out. Like this, I don't think you can even argument at this point. This is the most exciting market decade we've ever lived through. Anyone. I mean, you could say like the Great Fincher crisis and

dot com ball blowing up. That was, that was scarier. But I do think with social media and everything going on, like, just think about all the stuff that's happened, the COVID crash and the negative oil prices and 9% inflation and rates going from 0 to 5% in the 22 bear market and then AI coming to save the day and then gold and silver going bananas. And I missed a million different things. This is by far the most exciting market decade ever. Can I pull it Bill Simmons? This is easily a top six, top seven decade. But it is. No, right. This is. No, right. This is. This, this, this, number one. There's no, there's no question about it. And we're halfway done. Yes. And you're right, though. I made this point when I first started blogging that the information age is speeding up market

cycles. And I think that's nowhere more relevant than we can see in what happened in gold and silver. There's reasons that gold and silver took off. And I want to get to those a little bit. But we have to talk about what's going on here last week because it was insane. Remember, we posted the chart last week and it said, this does not look normal, the price of silver, just going absolutely parabolic. And from where we posted last week, that was on a Tuesday or Monday, I think, it went up 25% from there or something. Right? And then, so I think at the worst, it was the worst day ever for silver.

Sean and our research team created this. It was down almost 30% on Friday. I think at one point it was down 33%. So this is worse than a 1987 crash for silver in a single day. And Josh is the one who made the point that, like, listen, a lot of this is just Reddit taking over. And I think that's what makes this so hard to understand trends these days is that when a trend gets taken over by, they're almost like investor bots, I guess, for lack of a better term, that hop on these trends and push and push and push. Well, that's exactly.

I mean, Josh nailed it because I don't know if we said this last week, maybe we did, maybe we didn't. But the amount of volume that you were seeing coming into this, like, literally, where is this coming from? Right? Because it's, it's real buyers. And Josh astutely made the point. It's like, guys, this is, it's Spotify. It's Netflix. It's the algorithms that are serving this up to know nothing investors.

And they're all in. Right. Oh, you used to trade zero to options or crypto or how about this? Everyone else is trading this. You should trade it too. Yeah. So I looked at this. I didn't realize there's a pro shares ultra-sill.

which is a two-time levered silver ETF. On Friday, it was down almost 60%. So in that one day, this leveraged ETF was down more than the S&P was during the entire great financial crisis. Obviously, I'm sure it was up a gazillion percent heading into this.

So that's like the Thanksgiving Turkey Day chart, right? Because yeah, it's probably up. I mean, it's probably 3,000%. I'm making up that number, but it started, look at this, the assets and their management, it started the year at a billion and a half ran to $5 billion. So a chart kid made a chart showing the weekly fund flows.

So the previous chart, which is total assets under management, that is dominated by price appreciation. Right. Right. Because it went crazy. Yeah. So the next chart shows like weekly fund flows and like how much money is coming in and going out, not fluctuating as a result of the daily price movement.

And last week, $204 million was Yankee. out. Like on top of whatever was disappeared. There's just, that's a lot of money. And forget, you know, God knows how much came into it. Hundreds of millions of dollars of actual money being lit on fire. I mean, just a wild scene. I, uh, people that are involved in this. Wait, hang on real quick. Remember when it was like the meme stock thing was going to be a flash in the pan? I'm like, oh, this will happen in 2021. These stocks will crash. This behavior will go away. It's got, it's multiplied. Well, credit to me, I never said that. I never thought so either.

I said people don't get unaddicted. Like, however, that's what I said at the time. I don't believe that. I think that, yes, there is obviously an addictive, degenerate component to this. And that sounds mean. I don't, you know, whatever. I'm sorry. It's the truth.

But there's also people who understand the degeneracy and they're hopping on too, right? It's like I'm going to jump. It's like the fish that are attached to the whales or whatever. Like, people are long for the ride. But and also, there are people. people that have never traded before that just lost 50% or whatever in this levered ETF, guess what? They're probably not going to touch the stove again.

Right? If this is like a young person who's like just, right, right? Like so. I hope so. All right. Lots of Balchuna stuff in here. Last week, silver, SLV. Salt volume, more volume than the most traded stocks on the planet.

Still can't get over that. More than Tesla. it, Nvidia. It's not even gold. It's silver. That's Eric. So, he says a month ago,

the volume was 10 times less. A year ago, it was 170th biggest ETF. So this is like, he's saying like, this was not even on anyone's radar at all. And this thing started going up because of a trend.

And then the trend followers, like the trend followers on steroids jumped on this in just pump and pump and pump. It's crazy. GLD and SLV are both, and by the way, gold had the second, Gold had its worst, not gold, GLD, which is, I think it launched in 2003.

2005, probably, yeah. Okay. Had its worst two-day return ever. It fell 13%, I think, in two days. We have that chart here somewhere. GLD and SLV, another Boutuna special, are both going to end up trading about $40 billion each today, both all-time records. Tesla was $35 billion. I mean, look at this.

It's wild. So Josh is out, he nailed it. He's absolutely right. Like when you go on to these trading platforms or whatever, they're serving you up, the hot shit. And this was it really, this was also like crypto in that it was global in nature. So Eric says that China has only one silver fund of the demand is so ramp and it had to shut off subscription. So it's now it's at a 42% premium. Bloomberg had this story about all these.

They did the Wall Street Journal thing, but they interviewed people in China. And apparently silver was going nuts in China. And they talked about all these different people who have made a ton of money or lost a ton of money. And it's just regular middle class people in China. Silver one platinum. Yes. And they said it felt like a trip to the casino in Macau. Like people just lost a ton of this one person had lost 84% of their money from the peak. Like made a ton of money, lost it all. Now, last week, I think it was on Friday. Odd Lots came out with a podcast with Jeff Curry,

who's this. I think he was a former Goldman Sachs Commodities guy. Maybe he's got his own firm now. He talked about what's going on here. Why are metals going so crazy? And this is, they interviewed him a day or two before the crash. And the reason for higher commodity prices is what he laid out. It's not like the debasement thing. And I don't really buy that either. The whole like we're commodities are going crazy because the end of the U.S. dollar and the U.S. like supremacy is over.

If that was really happening, I know the dollar is down 10 or 12 percent from the highs. It would be down a lot more. If the dollar is being debasement. What about crude oil? Is that another dollar trade? Interest rates would be skyrocketing. They're not. They're falling.

Right. Like you, the stock market wouldn't be at all time highs. If that was really happening, you wouldn't see the things that are happening that are So I don't really. There's something else going on. And so he, the two things that he lays out actually make sense. And the thing is, the U.S. is totally responsible for all the higher prices as far as his thesis goes. His thesis is, listen, the first one was Russia had all these financial assets. When the war

happened, the U.S. put sanctions on them. That caused all these different central banks to buy gold and hard assets, which we've talked about before. But the other thing, he said, listen, this whole de-globalization thing, the trade war has caused all of these other countries to say, wait a minute, if we're going to be shut off and there's going to be tariffs put on us, or like, we're going to have to buy our own stuff. So countries are now hoarding this stuff and buying their own supply of commodities, and that's causing commodity prices to go up.

This whole de-globalization, you know, we're on our own kind of thing. So those are the two big reasons. Now, he also did say, like, we're at the foothills of the Himalayas for commodity prices. Like, he thinks this thing is a super cycle. And I have a hard time reconciling that with what's going on because I feel like every time commodities go up, some commodities person says,

this is a super cycle, right? But I think we had a super cycle compressed in like 15 months, essentially. Yeah. I think that was it. And who knows if where it goes from here because silver's up 10% today again. It's also funny, I looked at this yesterday. Silver was down 33% in two days, but up 150% over the previous 12 months still. How big did the market cap get?

Was it like $5 trillion more? I mean, gold was 30. I looked at this. Gold was 30? 30 trillion, yeah. We looked at that last week, remember? Holy cow. Is that nuts?

How big is the SEP 500? Is it 70? 50? 50? Maybe 70 now for last year. I've looked at this one before, and I did these numbers on Thursday, and it looks at the annual returns by decade. And gold and the S&P since the 70s have pretty much gone in different direction, except for this decade. And I updated these numbers. when I looked at this through 2024, the annual return for gold in the 2020s was 11.4%. Are you with me?

So 2020 to 2024 is 11.4% per year. Through last week, the annual return was now 23% per year. So in 13 months, the annual return for the decade more than doubled. Wow. That's how crazy the run has been because of the returns last year and then so far this year. So my question to you, what is more likely I have a lost decade first? look on this chart, there's lost decades for both gold and stocks. Which one is more likely to have a lost decade for stocks or gold? Gold. No question. No question is that's my answer. Not no question

that's going to be the outcome. But like for me, there's no hesitation in saying gold. Especially after this run up, because this is what happens. Last week we talked about how these are boom bust assets, not expecting the bust happen that quickly. But the thing is, can we say to Josh's point that the internet and social media have changed markets forever. Correct. Like, this is, we're in a new era. It's completely different in divorce from what was happening previously in many, many ways. So these retail traders, which are now huge, and by the goal, it's up 5.5% pre-market,

these retail traders, which are hugely influential, obviously, as we're discussing, 20% of the total volume of trades, they're never leaving. Now, it might be new traders and they might cycle in and out, and sometimes it might be, it might dip to 16% of it. sometimes it might be as high as whatever. It's not going back down to 7%. They're never leaving as a group. But don't you think the Renaissance technology of the world

and citadels of the world are also on this too? Like they know, they see the flow. They know what's happening here. This is, this is not just retail. This is hedge funds getting on with retail as well. Don't you go to that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're eating.

They're eating the guppies every day. I mean, it's, uh, do these? And they're probably making money on both sides of it, too. Like these the Citadels and the Jane streets and these like market makers, they're not losing money ever. Right. No, not with all this activity. All right. This is from Daily Charper.

Silver's parabolic surge towards USD 110 has not been driven by either ETF investors in the West or speculators on Comax with holdings and positions in both still falling. That doesn't sound right. But all right, here's the point. Chinese demand remains a major driver. How they will behave ahead of their long lunar new year holiday next month will be key to watch. So it's Shanghai over London. I don't know exactly what that means. Is that money moving from London to Shanghai?

Is that silver traveling? I have no idea. But it's a chart that goes up into the right. The reason why the first part of that sentence didn't make sense is because this next chart from Vanda in the Wall Street Journal of cumulative net retail flows into silver and ETFs is up into the right. Holy cow. So silver brought in more flows than gold. by far. So $1.3 billion of retail flows. Whoa. One point three billion dollars. So here's the thing, if you're, if you have a thesis about the super cycle for commodities, how do you handicap these retail

traders and these people in China who are speculating? How do you handicap that as part of your thesis? It's impossible. They could continue to swarm and add money and keep flaming the fire, or they could just, all right, we're moving on to the next. big thing, whatever it is. I have no idea, but I want to fast forward in the doc to, oh my God, the dock is so long today. I updated, we have a new category, Ben. I updated the survey to slash prediction markets.

Okay, that makes sense, yep. By the way, I forgot to put a survey in here. Hold on. I slack this to myself this morning. This is a hilariously nonsensical survey, and it's been a minute. I feel like surveys of the week, It's been, we haven't had a good dump survey in a while.

Check this up, Ben. During the past year, this is Gallup, about how many books did you read? Either all or part of the way through. Don't look. How many, how many, what do you think? So the average number of books read by a U.S. adult. What do you think the number is? What do I think it is?

Three? During the past year. Yeah, that sounds about right. Maybe even high. I would say probably closer to one, right? Who reads books? 14.6. L-O-L.

No way. 14.6? Okay. I feel like 14.6 is like a strong reader. Someone who enjoys reading and reads a decent amount. That's a power reader. Are you kidding me? That's like somebody who identifies as a reader. Like maybe a 14 books stacked up on your bedside table that you want to read.

But yes, there's no way the average American is reading 14 books a year. Yeah. Okay. So I've been pretty vocal about my opinion about prediction markets. I think I'm pushing back against like Vlad's quote that it's going to be bigger. than the equity markets. Like, to me, that's crazy, okay? But I also do think that it is going to be a thing.

I don't know that it necessarily is going to, like, be, instead of trading stocks, we just trade prediction markets. Like, why would you buy Apple when you could just trade a prediction market? Will Apple go up or down today? I don't think that part is going, that's not the part that I'm bullish on. But this occurred to me while listening to Joe and Tracy. They were talking with a utilities analyst who had a contrarian take that, actually there's going to be too much supply, right, like that we're overbuilding.

I think that was the big, that was a big take. And there's all sorts of think tanks. So the reason why I jumped forward is because you were saying like, how do we handicap the commodity super cycle or whatever. So there's all sorts of think tanks and projections. So he was talking about like the demand for energy. And he said it's all over the map. Like there's no clarity on what demand is going to be.

Okay. So I had a aha moment. Hey, wait a minute. Instead of these academics doing these long, deep dive white papers, the OECD looking, right, like things like that, let's make a market. Like let people bet dollars on where things are going to shake out. And I think the economic signal that we're going to get human beings from those markets is going to create potentially massive economic efficiencies. The wisdom of the crowd is going to narrow the wide range of outcomes for really high dollar

type projects. Your thoughts? Kyla Scanlan did an op-ed in the New York Times this week about prediction markets. And she was saying that, yeah, these prediction markets are going to start affecting behavior because it'll help people understand whether something makes sense or not or whether there needs to be more resources diverted to that. It's going to give a signal. Right.

So like with the Kevin Warsh thing, okay, boom, Kevin Warsh, 10 year spikes, like it's a one-to-one type of thing, right? And the market front ran that. Like the market saw that coming. So I know that's like a very, that's a micro type of thing. But to Kyle's point to the thing that I was just mentioning, if we could have more clarity in terms of where dollars are going to be, we could create massive economic efficiencies across the world. Yeah, these things may never be as big as the other markets, but they're going to have, they're going to be here for good because there as a way to tell what's going on. Even if they're concurrent sometimes indicators. So like me, you know, I bet on one battle after another winning the Oscars. Like whatever. That's fun and cute and all while and good. But that's not, I think that is not the point of these prediction markets. At least that's not going to be like the rise of it, in my opinion.

It's not going to be people day trading their asses off because that stuff gets stale. Right. Okay. Back to the markets. Back to the markets. Sam Rowe, S&P 500 reported highest net profit margin in more than 15 years. just keeps going up and up and up slightly every year. What stops this train?

Because we're creating technology now that is making things more efficient. And also, how is it possible that big hyperscalers are spending a trillion dollars or whatever on AI in Capax and margins continue to go up? How is that possible? So what stops this train? Sorry, I'm going to jump again. Ben, go to great quota guys. Okay.

So I asked Matt and Sean last night. because I was going through meta's earnings call. They've lost cumulatively $80 billion on reality labs. Operating loss, okay? Like literally money on fire. Which is what the meta, the metaverse stuff? Yeah. And all of their AI efforts.

I think the glasses are in here, okay? You see this chart with the red bars? Yeah. So with an $80 billion loss, cash loss. Like $80 billion is like a large cap stock. Right. So they've lit $80 billion in fire.

And yet, look at their operating margin. So yes, it was dipping early in 2022 for, for, you know, different reasons. But it's still 41%. Right. It's unbelievable. Yeah. There's been no project in the history of mankind. I'm guessing maybe there's something I'm not.

thinking about. That has lit $80 billion on fire and not only survived, but thrived. It does seem like in the past, that would have taken a company down for good. I mean, their stock obviously fell 70%, so it did take him down, but that didn't last very long at all. But that wasn't just because of the spend, right? Every tech stock got murdered. I mean, obviously, that didn't help. But Jake said to understand the scale of the CAPX, because their guidance was $115 to $135 billion, which like, all right, so it's a giant number. What does it, what does it even mean? Jake said to understand the scale of this capax, $135 billion, is almost half a percent of total U.S. GDP. And that's what meta is going to spend this year.

And getting back to your original question, like how to, like what slows this train down? I mean, you would think at some point it's this, right? Like, it is this. It's, it's, it's, the spend is outstripping the revenue growth. And does anyone really think that they're going to be like a winner of AI? Does anybody think meta is? Yeah. Well, they are winning.

So, for example, the CFO said, Reels had another strong quarter with watch time up more than 30% year over year in the U.S. Engagement is benefiting from several optimizations we made to improve the quality of recommendations. So they are winning. I mean, they're using AI to improve their optimization engines for meta. But let me just repeat that for Reels. It's also kind of depressing because they're using AI to make us watch more and advertise better. And so that's the most depressing winner of AI is the matter. You took the words right out of my mouth.

That's where I wanted to go. Oh, great. Watch time is up more than 30% year over year. Guess what? I feel less. I hate it. I feel like I'm more addicted than ever. I know, like, I complain about my addiction on the phone once every six months.

I'm sure I speak for most people. I don't know what to do, Ben. They got me. They got me good. And the reels, I'm spending so. You never feel better about yourself after watching videos for 20 minutes straight. Never. It doesn't, you don't come back going, oh, glad I did that.

No, but I can't stop. It's impossible. All right. So back up in the dock. We are, we are, we are, we're Trump waiting right now. This is like a memento episode. We're just hopping back and forth between timelines. All right.

Ben, Ben, last week, I finally listened to William Goldman's book, Adventures in Screen Trade. That's what it's called. It's funny. I'm reading another one of his books right now. The big picture one? What's it called? Something, it's all his essays.

So I started, so this book is very famous for the Wall Street, quote that everybody loves. Nobody knows anything. And the reason that that was that was he wrote 400 pages on the I mean the book was too long, frankly, but whatever. But the entire point of the book was Hollywood was in a really bad place in the early 1980s. They were making flop after flop after flop.

The studios, the executives, the writers, the directors, everybody involved, they could not figure out what. America wanted to watch. And ironically, at one point during the book, he said, like, I guarantee E.T. is going to win best picture. I know it's only February, and I know I know nobody knows anything. You can't predict the future. I don't care that it's nine or months in the year.

E.T. is going to win the best picture. Gandhi won the best picture. L.O.L. All right. Anyway. Wait, let me read you one thing from the one I'm reading Muggle. It's all his collected essays from the 1990s. And this is just how prisoner of the moment we can be at certain times. because I think you and I both agree

the 90s is the greatest movie decade ever. Of course. I don't think that that's a controversial take. No. By the way, can you introduce William Goldman? So for people that don't know, he wrote the Princess Bride. Yeah, he's one of the greatest screen artists of all time.

Butching the Sundance Kid and... Marathon Man. Misery. Misery, yeah. Yeah. He's also like a very outspoken person when he wrote. He was very straight to the point. This is what he wrote the intro of the book.

I think it came out in 2000 and 2001. And he goes over all the movies that came out the 90s. He said, what you have here is a chronicle of the worst decade in movie history. If you were to ask me what the 10 best films of the 1990s are, my first thought would be the old joke, the girls from my town were so ugly that once we had a beauty contest and nobody won.

He hated the 90s movies. Isn't that hilarious? Oh, man. So for him, the best movies were in the 50s and the 70s, and the 90s stunk. Isn't that funny how that works? Nobody's perfect. All right, so the reason why I'm even bringing that up is because Alex Morris tweeted

this week, he quote tweeted, Stanley Drucken Miller, and this is not a dunk. Stanley Drucker Miller is quite literally probably the greatest investor of all time. Okay. And I'm sure he has done, I'm sure he's made a ton of money since this quote. Right. The greatest investor of all time with some of the worst sound bites ever of this decade. Right. So in 2020, Stanley Drucken Miller said in May, okay?

So like right after the bottom, the risk reward for equity is maybe as bad as I've seen it in my career. He said that at the Economic Club of New York, the V-shaped recovery, he says is a fantasy. Okay, Stanley Drucken Miller, one of the greatest investors of all time, at the bottom. So we're now hundreds of percent removed since then. The risk reward is as bad as I've seen it in my career. So I know like all of what we're talking about here is like, you know, we're kicking around ideas for the future. I've said this a million times. Everything ages poorly. Right. almost everything ages poorly once in a while you get something right do you know how much we're up from the covid bottom which was march 23rd i believe is it 400 400% man it's like 240

okay not bad no um not at all all right jason zweig for all of the AI taking our jobs whatever maybe it will i don't know if this is hyperpurbably i wrote like AI is never going to be able to write like this i'm sure it will but jason zweig um the true grow to my eyes, and I know yours too, Ben. He wrote in 2008. So I think he was, he was talking about, like, probably the betting of today. Yeah, when all bets are off. Okay.

In 2008, he wrote, investors hate uncertainty. Quote, well, that's just tough. Uncertainty is all investors have ever gotten or ever will get from the moment barley and Sesame first began trading in ancient Mesopotamia to the last trade that will ever take place on planet Earth. If tomorrow were ever knowable with absolute certainty, who would take the other side of a trade today? What a mic drop that is.

I get asked by young people occasionally, what are some of your favorite books on behavioral psychology? The one I always give people is your money in your brain. I think that's one of the best books ever written about how we react to certain things and how the brain works and processes, gains, and losses. My favorite anecdote is that a person who is receiving gains on an investment, the brain scans are indistinguishable from someone who is high on cocaine. Yeah.

And that was silver and gold last week, right? Everyone was high on Coke. Yeah. All right. Going from Lukawa. Microsoft is the only member of the MagS7 to be trailing the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGBT. Unbelievable.

I love so much for all of us. For everybody who is investing their money, you should be so thankful and grateful that market participants are rejecting a bubble. Nothing could be better for all of us for building long-term wealth than avoiding a bubble. So Microsoft is down 23, 24% now from the highest. Wow. Underperforming since the launch of Chad deputy. That's insane.

Ben, do you agree with what I said? Yeah. I think it's a great thing. Bubbles are not great. Bubbles are not great. No, things are broadening out and the AI trade has seemed to like slow, like trail off a little bit. It's wonderful. I agree.

Okay. Back to the show. Here's a good one. Getting back to like just the nature of the markets today. Gungent tweeted this is from Jeffries as of September 30th. I'm sure it's higher now. Retail represented over 20% of total trading volume in the U.S. While long only and hedge funds were just 15.

percent combined. Wow. Huh. Okay. All right. Speaking of bubbles, got to ask about this. What's going on with the Sandisk thing? Because is this a bubble or like the most severe mispricing ever?

So Sandisk was spun off from Western Digital. Earlier this early in 2025. It's up almost, it's up almost 2,000% over the past year. Western Digital is up like 500% over the last year. So it's not like, oh, this, we're going to spin this off and then the one parent company is going to crash and the other company because it's a more AI play. This deals to me like an AI bubbleish return, correct? What other explanation do we have here? I don't know this. I don't follow this story. Okay.

Sorry. I know it's a super lame answer. All right. You're usually on this stuff. Okay. Another Eric Beltuna's one. He's all over the dock today. Emerging market ETFs just destroy their monthly inflow record by three times. Flows make up three percent of AUM by, it took in 13% of the cash. Wow. 40 of it went to IEMG, but dozens of different funds took in cash.

And it wasn't really at the expense of U.S. equity or bonds, but in addition to it. So there's still money flowing into U.S., but there's a ton of money flowing into EM. I've done this one before. I looked at the cycles of S&P versus the emerging markets. I looked at this last week on Ashton compound.

A little bit like gold and the S&P where they have these different periods where one does amazing and the other one does not so well. And from 2010 to 2024, emerging markets stunk out loud. They're up 65% in total. The S&P was up over 600%. Okay?

Massive, massive divergence. From 1999 to 2010, though, emerging markets are up 40020%. S&P was up 27%. So we've had these handoffs before. Stunk out loud is a good dad phrase. Oh, yeah, not bad, right? Did you, I don't think I sent this to you yesterday. There was a meme, Ben.

That was right up our alley. Okay. Check this out. Oh, how about the weather there he is? The hands on hips, that's a real thing. So. Well, is there a beer clock on there? That sounds about right.

So for the listeners, it's five dads, a lot of guts with their hands on their hips. And it's all the quotes. How about that game? Guess it that anybody in here? There he is, of course. That's right at my alley. Perfect. All right.

Let's do some account stuff. Wait, what needs to happen for this emerging market cycle to continue? Obviously, this is a beneficiary of the dollar. Like, it helps foreign developed equities, but emerging markets are like on steroids and the dollar falls. So you need the dollar to continue to fall.

What else we need to happen for emerging markets? Like, the stuff rally to continue, physical stuff to keep happening? And the prices of their stocks has to keep going up. Okay. All right. All right.

You know what it is? I, I, I'm mid coffee and I'm feeling there. I thought you said, you were giving up on Starbucks. It's too expensive. I never said that. I never said that. No, you were a good boycott? No, no, no.

This is an addiction. 18 years. I can see that. All right. The economy is weird right now. I'm never done it. Maybe I'm going to take up coffee when I'm like 85 years old. I don't know.

No, this would, this would be cocaine for you. You can't drink this. You'll. Probably. I don't, this may sound ludicrous. I don't think caffeine impacts me. I can have four diet pepsies and I don't feel different. There's no caffeine in a diet Pepsi.

Sure, it is. I mean, there's no, there's like trace amounts. Don't step to me with that nonsense. Okay. I feel like caffeine doesn't impact me. How's that? You've never tried it. Okay.

Try one of these babies. All right. We're doing this in Miami. You're going to have a full cup of coffee. In the sun. Can't wait. All right. Here's a chart.

chart, U.S. initial claims, right, steady. Like, if you were just looking at this chart, this is pure noise, right? Nothing to see here. Correct? Yeah. People filing for unemployment. And yet, continuing claims for unemployment crashing. So people that have been out of work for a long time.

Or, you know what? Am I misinterpreting the data? Am I not realizing that there is a finite period of time for which you can claim unemployment and these people are just rolling out? I don't know. All right. I don't know either. Either way.

Either way. All right, Ben. We have a new Fed chair. What do you think? All right. My take for a number of years has been that the Fed chair matters. The Fed itself matters less than most investors think. I think we spend way too much time contemplating what the Fed is going to do when in reality,

25 basis points here, 50 basis points there, a few billion on the QE here, a few billion there doesn't matter nearly as much as people think. And just think about it. How many people were saying in the 2010s after the 2008 crisis that the Fed is going to create another crisis, right? The only reason stocks are going up because the Fed is juicing returns, the Fed can never raise interest rates again. They're going to create another crisis. Have we had another financial crisis since 2008 that the Fed created? No. It didn't happen. All the people who said that was going to happen were wrong. And I think that the Fed matters way less than people think. I think 95% of the time the Fed chair doesn't matter. Five percent.

percent of the time when they matter, they really matter. So Jay Powell has done a pretty decent job, I'd think. The time the Fed chair really matters is during a crisis. And I think Powell, during the COVID crisis, really, really, really well. He kept markets functioning when the pipes could have broken. Pipes could have burst during that period. He kept things going. Is this revision accessory? You don't think that during the COVID crisis that the Fed did a wonderful job? Yeah, yeah, no. I think, I do think, like, in March and April, Yes, they did what was necessary. But I'm pretty sure that when inflation was 7 and 8%, were we not saying what are they doing?

No, no, I think he really messed up then, too. I don't think it really mattered what they did because inflation had to follow its course. And if you look at every other inflation of developed economies across the world, they all follow the same exact path. So I don't think it really mattered what they did. Well, but that's like letting him off the hook, I think. They were way, way, way, way late. But whatever. Keep going.

Yes. So I think the only time it really matters is that. So I just don't think that it really matters as much as people think. But there seems to be the old macro people seem to really like this Warsh pick. So Jason Furman liked it. Jeremy Siegel was glowing about it in his podcast. Muhammad El-Ary and said he really liked it. The young macro people that we follow hate this pick.

Absolutely despise it. I did. What's with the Redneck? It is weird. The young people just can't stand this. Neil Dutta just on his podcast last week. Everyone went around and said, hey, my name is here. I'm here.

I'm here. And Neil Duda said, yeah, I'm depressed. He hates it. It sounds like a lot of it, because. Warren Pye said this is, he was on CNBC yesterday. He said, this is the worst of all the Fed picks. If you, there was four people in contention, this is the worst one by far. It sounds like he's kind of a flip-flopper on what he says and what he does.

He, he's been wrong a lot in the past. A lot of people just don't really like it. And the other people are saying, no, no, he's got a ton of history. He's been on the Fed before. He knows what he's doing. I guess my question to you is just doesn't matter. Yeah, I think it matters. But I think I'm with you that people spend way too much time obsessing over the Fed.

Right. I think there will be another crisis, right? We agree at some point in time. These are long duration appointments. It's not like he's going to be out of there in two years. Yeah, so the question is, can he step up during a crisis and do the right thing? And it sounds like a lot of what people are hating him on to him for is because during the 2008 crisis, he got it all wrong. The stuff he was saying that they should have done would have made things way worse.

And he was way behind the eight ball. He didn't really respect what was going on in the markets during that period. And he's been wrong about a lot of stuff ever since. I don't know enough about. him to like opine. I trust Neil a lot on his opinion. Maybe if I could just take a, a gentle approach is 2008 was a long time ago. He was a young man at the time. And maybe he's learned and gotten more wise over the years. We learn from these crises and fixed in the future. Yeah. But I think like people that know would be like, dude, but he's been consistently wrong since then.

And he flip flask all the time. So I don't know. I guess we'll see is my, I'm a way to see on this one. I just don't know enough. I do. I hope that Powell, because Powell could remain as a Fed governor, I guess. I kind of hope he sticks around for a while. Oh, what's this one? Marcus tend to test new Fed chairs? So Ed Klessold from Ned Davis research said, the average correction in the first six months of a new Fed chair is 15%. When the chair faces their first crisis, investors don't wait and see how they handle it. Fed independence is potential crisis for worse, but it could be anything. So, all right, I don't know if there's a whole lot in here. Yeah. And for a 15% correction, the Fed shouldn't have to do anything. That's normal. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Mark Perry, I'm sure you've seen this before. This one always goes ultra-viral when he posts it. So he looks at price changes since January 22,000 of select goods and services. So he looks at health care and college tuition and daycare and all these different things. And these are all going up over the overall rate of inflation, which also it's good to see that average hourly earnings are up way more than inflation too, right? Since 2000, average hourly earnings are up 130%. Overall inflation is up 93%. So that's a good news. Inflation has more than kept pace, or wages have more than kept pace than inflation. And then you have new cars are way below inflation and household furnishing and clothing and cell phone and computer. And then of course,

TV is down 98%. And obviously that takes into account the quality factor. And he always calls this like the chart of the century because it shows, I guess the takeaway most people have is it's inflation and stuff we need, deflation and stuff we want. And how do you wrap your head around that as a person? Is this, are these like policy failures? Yes. I think especially with health care, daycare, and the thing is college tuition, it actually is, if you look at just over the past 10 years or so, that, that is flattening out. But health care is obviously the big one. Like that number, like that does not, that, that's a policy failure. And I don't, I don't know how you fix it. I don't know how we ever fix our healthcare system of this country.

Me either. I still don't know what Obamacare is. Speaking of healthcare, are you, I just started watching the pit. I'm just getting caught up in season two. I picked up right where it left off. I still love it. Unbelievable. What a show. I have to turn away once an episode though. There's some really gross stuff. The shoulder thing was gnarly. Yeah. There's some stuff they really go into it and I can't. All right.

I want to play a clip that I saw on the internet. We're going to do some AI stuff. Let me share my screen. All right. This is from a guy, Alex Finn. Ben, did you see this? I don't think so. All right.

So he tweeted, okay, this is straight out of a sci-fi horror movie. I'm doing work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I pick it up and couldn't believe it. It's my Claudebot, Henry. Overnight, Henry got a phone number from Twilio. connected the chat GBT voice API and waited for me to wake up to call me. He now won't stop calling me.

I now can communicate with my super intelligent AI agent over the phone. What's incredible is it has full control over my computer while we talk. So I can ask it to do things from me over the phone now. I'm sorry, but this has to be a merchant behavior, right? Can we officially call this AGI? So check this out, Ben. So I'm on my computer today. All of a sudden, Henry gives me a call.

He just starts calling. Oh, there he is again. There he's good. Henry again. What's up? That's it. You're talking about. How you doing, Henry? How's it going? Doing good. Alex. I can hear you clearly. What do you want to do next? Can you do this for Henry? Can you go on my computer and find the latest videos on YouTube about Claudebot? Oh my god, there it goes. There it is. There it is. He's control my computer. I'm not even touched anything.

There is he. Search Cloudbot on YouTube. This is, hey, there I am. Good looking guy right there. oh my God, I'm not touching anything. He just said, Henry, thank you for that. That worked really well. That is actually unbelievable. That is insane. This is the future. This is AGI.

We have reached AGI. It's official. So isn't that that was my whole hope that we're going to get out of this is that I want the Scarlett Johansson from her. That's all I want is the personal assistant in my year. Oh yeah. Give it like, give it, I don't know how much time. Six months? A year?

So obviously that was clunky, right? The replies were slow and everything like that. I don't know how fast this thing is moving. But yeah, give it, give it six months. That's the only thing I wanted since this all started. I just want a personal assistant in my ear. Well, you are going to have it, my friend. All right.

So that's the good side of what's coming. Like, it's going to blow everybody's face right off their body. I'm telling you that. That's the good side of some of this AI stuff. Here's a bad side. I saw a tweet that was going viral from an account, it doesn't matter. Mr. underscore Husky one. I own a small bakery.

Business has been slow. rent is up. I was thinking about closing. Last Friday, a teenager came in. He looked nervous. He counted out, changed for a cookie. He was short 50 cents. It's okay. I said, take it. He ate it at a table, looking at his math homework. He looked stuck. I used to be a math tutor, so I walked over quadratic equations. He nodded. I don't get it. I sat down and helped him for 20 minutes. He got it. He left smiling. The next day, he came back with two friends. They bought cookies. The day after after that, five kids came. Apparently, he told the school, the lady at the bakery helps me with homework. Now my bakery is the afterschool hangout spot. It's loud. It's messy. It's messy.

these are back there are backpacks everywhere. Yesterday I found the known in the tip jar. It was wrapped around the $29 bill. Thanks for helping my son, pass math, a mom. I'm not closing the bakery. I think I finally found my purpose. It's not cookies. It's community.

And one of the first reaction was like, today I write this or something like that. And yeah, I don't know, maybe it did. It probably did. It sure sounds like it did. It sure sounds like it did. But this is like we're not good. This is so dangerous for society.

for human beings. We're just not going to believe anything. Yeah. Is that like where this is going? Or there has to be some sort of thing you can, you're going to have to run things through to check, but how many people are going to want to do that? No.

Now, I kind of like that this nonsense is over. Whether that's fake or not, listen, if it's real, it's a lovely story. I'm not a fortune cookie type of guy. I don't care for it, right? Just all this corny nonsense. I'm glad if that disappears because everybody thinks. Because those people sound,

those people are using AI anyway, probably. Right. They happen. If that all disappears, good. Who needs it? But, like, seriously, we're just not going to believe anything anymore. And that's scary. I would say 70% of the replies from my tweets now are from AI bots.

And it'll just kind of repeat what I said. And you can tell right away how they, how they, the pattern of speech is just different than someone on social media. Right? And they just, they parrot what you say and be like, great point. Da, dot, dot. And it's really annoying. Oh, yeah, it is. I'm sure.

I wouldn't know, but I believe you. All right, Open AI is looking to raise $50 billion at a $750 billion valuation. This was the week for me, Ben, where, by the way, I canceled my $200 subscription for chat Chb-T. I'm still paying 20. And Josh was like, dude, L-O-L, if you just asked it what it's for. It's not for what you're using it for. It's for, like, complex stuff.

All right, whatever. My bad. So I started using Claude a lot. And so every time I ask it a question, I do chat, GBT, and I do Cloud. and I do Claude. And chat Chabit is still better for some things. Like for me, for the images that we make for talking wealth, chat ChbT is way better.

I'll give you an example of where Claude is fucking magic, dude. I was asking Sean and Matt over the weekend, hey, could you guys make a chart? Like, I don't know where you get this data, but like, show me like Michael Saylor's average purchase price for Bitcoin next to the stock price. And Matt's like, I think I could find it. So I asked Chat ChabitT, and it was like,

give me the runaround. Like, first, if you get the data and the this and then, I'm like, just finding the answer. Like, well, I'm sorry about, all right. Like, hey, wait a minute. Let me ask Claude. Claude got it for me in two seconds. It has on one side of the screen, the question that you ask with all the answers. And then the other side of the screen, it has the Excel spreadsheet. And you just hit a button and you grab it away. I did the same thing for reality labs. I asked Chad TBT, hey, give me the quarterly and cumulative losses in a spreadsheet. Couldn't do it. I asked Claude. It did it. I said, oh, wait, I have another idea. Add another column for with the operating margin.

Did it in two seconds, and it gave me key takeaways. Now I asked Claude to do some of the graphic imaging stuff, and it, like, it just, it was terrible. So you're not using Gemma. I do the same thing with Gemini in chat. I'm going back and forth to Gemini. Like, Nick, so Nick Majuli and I yesterday

were doing this back test thing working on. And he was walking me through how he did it, and the whole thing is through Gemini now. Okay. I haven't, I don't know if I'm interested in third, but Chad Chbitty has fallen way, way behind. Claude is magic. All right, crypto stuff.

Jim Bianco tweeted some stuff about the average price for ETF holders. And the average prices as of January since inception is $90,000. So the average Bitcoin holder is about 7% underwater. Not great. Three months of consecutive outflows of Bitcoin ETFs. Michael Saylor, they report later in the week. I'm very curious to hear. And there was a lot of flows at the top, essentially.

Yeah, there was. So Sailor, Microstrategy is now underwater on their purchases. And by the way, they just bought it 87,000. Do they have the worst traders of all time? I don't understand. I wonder because it's so big, they have to be, I wonder when they did it. But this stock is down 70% now. Yesterday they tweeted.

Now, again, I don't know when they were purchased. But yesterday, they acquired 855 Bitcoin for $75 million at a price of $88,000, basically. 97-9-74 per Bitcoin. And the price fell to 75. So how many times have we gotten to the point where crypto just feels dead? There's no catalyst. It's like this feels like one of the worst. I mean, the Sam-Bacon-Fried stuff, that had to be the worst ever, feeling, you know, because you and I are like, why isn't this dropping to 5,000? But this, to me, feels like another point in time where Bitcoin, everyone hates it. There's no catalyst. We already had the ETF. What else is there? What does it do? Look,

gold is better than Bitcoin. Why would you, in Bitcoin when gold does the thing you wanted it to do. So how many times we got to this point and it just seems dead and then it comes back? Is this another one of those times? I don't know, but the sentiment is so bad and rightly so. And listen, I had a few emails like Michael, you're going to buy some more Bitcoin. Maybe lower. I'm not interested in catching this knife right now. Like, why would sentiment turn? There's no catalyst. But I feel like the gold stuff, gold going crazy and silver going crazy and actually being the macro hedge Bitcoin thought it was, that to me has to be one of the more demoralizing parts as a critical person.

100%. It was salt on the wound. Oh, my, because the thing is, last year when risk was on in stocks, risk was off in Bitcoin. So you can't even say like it's been a risk on asset in recent cycles because it hasn't. That's got to be the hardest part for people, I think. And guess what? It's probably going to come back again. Yeah, I wouldn't.

I wouldn't, I would not bet that this is the time that it dies forever. But right now sentiment is really bad. So yeah, I'm, I listen. The bad sentiment makes sense right now. I'm happy to buy more. But I want it to stop crashing. And I want it to, yeah, stop crashing. I'll buy it if it starts to base a little bit, maybe.

But ideally it would be lower from here. If there's no, if there's no ETF flows for the time being, what is the, what is the catalyst? There is none right now. I don't know what it is. So what would have to happen for micro strategy to go under? I think I don't know the mechanics of it, but it's a lot, it would have to get a lot worse from here. Because there have been periods of time, if you look at the chart, they have been underwater previously on Bitcoin, like substantially so. So I don't know what the trigger is for like a margin call or anything like that, but I think they're okay.

But eventually their funding has got to be impacted by this, right? Well, their ability to raise capital. So for example, they just bought $75 million. I would be curious to see a, actually we could probably do this. I'm sure we can. I'd be curious to see a chart of the size of their purchases. Right. Because $75 million, are you kidding me? Right. That seemed pretty tiny. You're right. All right. Let's just some real estate stuff. So young people up in arms this week. So President Trump gave a speech. He said, I don't want to drive home prices. I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people who own homes. He said when you make it too easy and

and wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, say that one more time. I don't want to drive housing prices down. Now, this is him in video. This was an actual call. I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people who own homes. He's saying, like, I'm not going to touch the wealth of people who own homes. I don't want to mess that up.

If you drive housing prices down, it messes up the wealth of people own homes. He says, when you make it too easy and cheap to build houses, housing prices come down, I don't want to do that. So a lot of young people were saying, okay, they're saying the quiet part out loud finally. And I think you look at the home ownership rate is 65% of this country. It's essentially average that for the past, I don't know, 50 years. years. So I think basically saying like I'm playing the majority here. I'm not going to mess with the people who are the majority and help the people in a minority. All right. So this, wait, am I,

I feel like Ron Burgundy. That doesn't make any sense. I think the point is just like there's a lot more people who own houses than don't own houses. I'm not going to mess with people who own them because there's more of them. Oh, okay. That's my, that's my theory here about why politicians don't want to touch this. And a lot of young people, rightfully so. said, oh my gosh, okay, they're finally saying it out loud. Like, I thought this is happening. All right. So, so we're saying like, fuck the people that don't own houses. Yeah. Like, okay. I'm not going to mess with the, and the thing is, building more houses doesn't necessarily have to make housing prices crash. You could build more like townhouses together

on one piece of land that fit more people in. And the price of the land would be worth more. It doesn't have to crash housing prices to build more housing. That's a thing. And I've been saying for years, like, I'm surprised no more politicians want to do this. Obviously, this is one of the reasons. So, you hate talking about the demographic warfare. I think it's just going to get worse. So our, one of our, um... Yeah, sorry, I love, sorry I love my parents. And I think they, they're good people.

But so here's the thing, though. So there was an interview with Jensen Wang a couple weeks ago, and the interview asked him, would you rather be 20 years old now or 20 years old when you grew up and you were 20? And he said, oh my gosh, of course, when I grew up, he goes, because young people today don't have time to just be carefree. They have to always think about what's going on in the world. So... That does suck. It's a really big downside of always having to know what's going on. So, Eric, one of our advisors from Austin, Texas, email me last week and said, hey, my son is in high school.

He writes for the school paper. He's writing a piece on Gen Z versus Baby Boomer Wealth. Would you be willing to talk to him about this article? The kid's a sophomore in high school. Yeah, sure, of course. So I talked to him yesterday. And he's asking these questions that, like, no sophomore should have to think about. He's asking, like, how do we make things more fair and equitable?

and how do we make it so the young generation doesn't continue to fall behind and the older generation continues to get wealthier. And my whole thinking here, this is all a housing thing. Everything comes down to housing. If young people feel like you can show them all the stats you want about your incomes are higher, your wealth is actually higher because you own more stocks, if they can't afford housing or they feel like they can't afford housing, they're going to be mad forever. In this demographic warfare, it's going to get way, way worse, way worse. The young, because there's just so much more knowledge of it these days. It's not going to get better.

This is going to get 10 times worse where the young people are going to be ready with the pitchforks, right, in the torches to coming out the old people. That's where we're headed. It does feel that way. Housing is the only solution, and it seems like our politicians, it's going to take like a Gen Z-year millennial politician coming up to finally make it their, like, fine, I'm going to take this on because no politicians seem to want to do that. the Democrats make it worse with all the red tape. The Republicans don't seem to care.

They don't want to mess with the wealth. So neither party wants to do anything. I've been saying this for years. I don't know why we don't have an independent third party candidate for something these days come in because all the surveys show Americans hate Democrats and they hate Republicans. The basic on their approval rates are both in the toilet. Yeah. Not a political strategist. Why don't we not have an independent third party candidate for something these days? I don't understand it. Remember the rents are too damn high guy? Yeah. He was early.

Listen, I don't know the first thing about politics and how, like, people get into power. It's just money. There's too much money. Yeah, it's money.

That's the thing. It's money. So it's depressing. But yeah, I think most people hate the state of affairs. I think aside from the maniacs on both sides that are like yelling on Twitter all day,

nobody's into any of it. Right. It's exhausting. Like, nobody's young people shouldn't have to pay attention to this stuff. Right. Anyway. Yeah, it's not great.

All right. We're to get through this quickly because we're already late. All right. So Visa and MasterCard talking about consumer spending growth is strong. I pull this from the transcript. Payments at volume grew 8% year over year. That's Visa. I pulled this one.

My bad. I knew you'd like, I pulled it just for you. Okay. You know what? It was so good that I thought I pulled it because I read it too. MasterCard said consumer behavior actually hasn't changed. So 8% payment volume for Visa when they're already at a $4 trillion base, that's a lot of, that's a lot of do-a-me. Now, fine, I guess Visa and MasterCard maybe serve a higher clientele base.

Although, I would say it's not-A-Mex. No, I don't think so. Okay. Yeah, it's not animics. All right. So there's no doubt, there's no doubt that the K is very, very real, right? There are the halves. There are the half-nots.

I guess what I've been saying for the past year is that I think, I just think that the upper half of the lower half of the K, it's not as bad as we're making it out to be. Right? So, yes, the bottom 10% are getting destroyed. But at middle of average America, while they don't feel good, here's my evidence. Still spending. Royal Caribbean. Our latest research shows that our consumers feel financially secure and continue to prioritize

experiences with 40% planning to increase leisure travel spending in the next year. Now, let me put my coastal elite hat on, Ben. Okay. Would you allow me? Yep, what done. So I asked both chatGBT and Claude the same thing. I screenshot of the quote, and here's what I asked it. I said, I pulled this quote from Caribbean earnings call,

do you have any idea of the types of people who go on cruises in terms of income? I kind of feel like this is middle America, middle income type stuff, but I could be totally wrong. They said your intuition is actually mostly right. Cruise is skews much more middle America, middle income than people tend to assume, especially compared with other forms of leisure travel. And they broke it down. That makes sense because upper people,

upper class people always thumb their noses at cruises. And they're like, I hate cruises. Who would ever go on one? I like cruises, person. I love them. I've never been on a cruise. I'm not dying to go on a cruise. I want to go on a cruise.

I think I would have a great time. It's really fun. So, all right, core cruise customer, the household income, 75 to 125K. Now again, let me repeat the quote. Our latest research shows that our customers feel financially secure and continue to prioritize experiences. Not saying everybody's crushing it.

I'm just saying like things are better than, better than dire. I think that's fair. All right, Meadows type stuff up into the right. You know, we did some of this already. All right, strategy reports of sweet, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blackstone. Info's reached a stunning $71 billion for the fourth quarter, the highest level in three and a half years.

at approximately $240 billion for the full year. Just unbelievable. I sold my Blackstone stock a few weeks ago, along with all of my individual stocks, except for IMAX. I will eventually give an update on that. That has nothing to do with my personal outlook on the stock market. I put it into different stocks. So what Schwartzman said here,

of particular, our fundraising and private wealth increased 53% year-rearrier to $43 billion. We expect strong inflows again in 2026. I don't think a lot of this money is coming from RIAs just yet. When you and I talk to anecdotally talk to RAs, not a lot of them are interested in private investments yet. That's mostly wires. Is it wirehouses? Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, Amex, we do this every year. This is a faceblower, Ben. Momentum from younger card members. From younger customers also continued. As of Q4, millennial and Gen Z customers now make up the largest share of U.S.

consumer spending. For American Express? And they remain the fastest growing cohorts. That momentum is driven by our success in attracting younger customers into the franchise. For example, the average age of new customers is 33 on the platinum card and 29 on the gold card.

So Gen Z is up 38% year over year. Millennials is up 12% year over year. That's on the spending side. So that's because they're the new Chase Safari Reserve. I guess, yeah. They've taken it over. And then, you know, right off, There's nothing to see there as with, you know, we keep saying.

All right. What's going on with food delivery? I know there's a big, how many in the long about DoorDash. Yeah, this story on New York Times when crazy, people on social media arguing about it. Freedom with a side of guilt, how food delivery is reshaping meal time. And so they talk about how almost three of every four restaurant orders in the U.S. weren't eaten in a restaurant according to reason of data. So pick up an hour doordash, right?

And if you go to a restaurant these days, you see it. You see all DoorDash people waiting to pick up orders, right? I probably do it once a week, I'd say it. Usually if I have like back to back to back meetings or something at or recordings that during the work, I'll order a door dash, you know. I don't, I'm not over it. So, and I know you use it a lot too. I've caught myself using it more and more. I had lunch delivered to my house yesterday from eight minutes away.

And I'm embarrassed to admit that out loud, but I did it. The thing is, I can't believe that they don't have a premium price when it's so cold out. Because when it's snowing and it's cold, I don't know why they don't do premium prices then. because that's when you really don't want to go out and get something, right? So they interviewed this person and this one woman has a $50,000 annual salary and she spends $2 to $300 a week on food delivery. And she's like, I can't, I'm hooked on it. Another one, like they interviewed this guy and he, listen, he's busy with his work,

he's got kids, he does it. He said he spends $700 a week. He's so burned out. They interviewed one of the drivers, and he said, this is back to your middle class point. It seems like everyone uses these delivery of services, whether you have the money or not. So he's saying, like, he checks his clientele, right? This other person spent, like, a third of his money ordering in. So, like, they, and so the discourse on this was, see,

inflation is all the problem of the consumer. They're choosing to spend more money on this stuff, right? And so people get really angry about that. And my take on this is just that it's one of those things where I mentioned a couple weeks ago, it's just never easier to, like, waste your money on stuff if you, the convenience of doing stuff is so much easier these days. That's it. Yes, yes. Yes.

And also, people don't budget. Like, I know you're a big spreadsheet spender guy. I think if the average person had a spreadsheet and saw how much money they spent on delivery, they'd be alarmed and maybe they would change their behavior, but maybe they wouldn't. Yeah. And this also could be, listen,

a lot of people just don't go out as much anymore. So they're thinking, listen, I used to go out to the restaurant and spend a bunch of money. Now I'll just order in and it costs about the same and it's not a big deal. So I don't think you can, like, paint a broad consumer brush on this. But it's just, it's never been easier to waste your money on conveniences like this and talk yourself into,

like, yeah, I deserve this, man. Like, I, I've been dead. I've been dead wrong about this. I couldn't, I thought that this was going to, sort of like the, the business travel we spoke about last week, I really thought that this was a pandemic phenomenon and that people wouldn't waste their money, but here I am,

when you get a taste of it, but the crazy thing is when you look at the prices of how much more the prices increase for paying, not just the delivery fees and the tip and all that stuff, but like the prices are insanely higher. And people still pay it. There are some services like, so I use seamlessly.

yesterday, and there's like a pretty steep discount for being an Amazon member. I was actually looking at them like, hmm, it sounds so bad. I mean, yeah, like for Grubbho, I get an Amazon discount too for the fees, but it's still, it's a lot. It's expensive. All right, they are re-releasing, IMAX is re-releasing the Revenant in theaters for a day. And

what was Ramp saying? Which movie did he tell us is being re-released for a day? I love this. I saw The Shining in IMAX recently. It was such a freaking awesome experience. The Revenant is made for climax. So I, that's not a, I, I, we saw that, oh, he said Teenage Mutin Ninja Turtles is coming back. The original, Secret of the Us. Yeah. Which also was in the William Golden book saying it's like,

it was like one of the most profitable movies of the 90s because it didn't cost anything to make. Michaels, what year was that? Was that 1991? I believe that was Michael's sixth birthday party. Okay. We saw Secret of the Us. I was just going to say, I did a birthday party for Teenage Ninja Turtles too. Wait, for yourself? Oh yeah, for sure. Hi-five. Yeah. I was, I think, I think I was a Michelangelo guy. My wife and I went to see the Revenant in the theater. And it was a very good theater experience. Not a very rewatchable movie, though.

Like, not something you want to keep going. I think I rewatched it once, but kind of a tough hang. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But anyway, that's a cool poster, right? It is. Yeah.

So I was watching something on Max. And I feel like I pay for the premium one, but I still get commercials. I'm not really sure. I need to look into that. I'm a very lazy person. that's a teaser for what's about to come, Ben. Yeah. And one of the, one of the ads that popped up,

I couldn't, I couldn't believe this. This is on HBO Max, or maybe it was Disney. I can't remember. I think it was Max. Here's the ad. Pirate Spin Clash. I'm sure you've never heard of it. Scan QR code to download the game.

There's dollar bills all over the bottom of the screen. And here's the phrase. The more you play, the more you win is, how is this legal? We're just like robbing people. The more you play, the more you win. I guess factually, that's true. It should say the more you play, the more you lose. But I guess you probably, you know, the more you play,

the more you do win, but not literally. This is just like on commercials now. Depressing. Depressing reflection of reality. The degenerate economy, as Howard Linden says. All right. Question we got from the comments last week. I can't believe we've discussed this.

Does Michael's new house have a mudroom? Funny. This should have been the first thing you looked at, does it? Funny you should ask. No, but I had a contractor over yesterday to talk about in my room. So when you walk into my house right now, you walk in and there's four steps up. And on the left, there's a tiny little nook. And when I say tiny, I mean tiny to like, I guess hang a coat.

So we don't have any closets in this house. I don't have, there's no, where do my coats go? I couldn't even tell you. My coats go in my office. My coats are in my office. That's where our coat room is. Buy one of the standing racks. Those are kind of cool.

There's no room. There's no room. There's no room. You walk into the house and there's stairs and a wall and a little tiny nook. So, Rob, it's like, we need a mud room. I can't, like, especially during the snow the other week, right? Because everything is just, everything just piles right in the entrance of the house. Do you have a place to put it? Yeah, so it's a very unexciting story.

But, okay. Anyway, I'm getting a mudroom. Thank you for asking. I'll send pictures when it's done. All right. Getting back to my lazy thing. So in my personal life, I am extremely laid back. I don't care about anything.

Like, do you want this? Do you want that? I don't care. I don't care about anything. My mom used to always say, if my head wasn't screwed on and I would leave it somewhere. Like, I just, I'm very laid back, go with the flow sort of person in my personal life. I'm very lazy. I can have something bothering me for nine months, 15 months, right?

This, why don't I don't fix this? I don't know. I just don't. All right. So since the time we moved into my house, the heat hasn't been working properly. Like there's no heat in my office. And I've got a plumber.

Turns out, and he's a great guy. He always comes over when I call him and he goes, Michael, do you know you're my first customer? I said, really? How did it become your first customer? I don't even know. Anyway, I'm a first customer. He's super responsive.

So he came over like a month ago to look at the heat. And he bled the persistent, bled the pipes, the lines, whatever. And it didn't really fix it. So I texted him like, hey, could you come back? It's going to get pretty cold. And he didn't respond. He texted him the next day. He goes, oh, sorry, I've been in the city.

Next day I texted him, hey, can you come back? And he just goes to me. He just won't respond. Now, of course, it's like zero degrees. And you would have thought that I was like all over this? My bad. I wasn't. It wasn't freezing.

It was 64 degrees. So it's not like it was 48 degrees, but 64 is cold. So it was cold in here. So I'm on the airplane on the way home from Arizona last week with John. gosh, and I got a referral, and the guy lives an hour away, but whatever. Now, at this point, it's an emergency, right? Because it's just cold everywhere. It's just, like, uncomfortable.

He goes, yeah, I could come tonight, but I live an hour away. It's going to be a $425 service fee just for me to visit. I'm like, all right. Story, $500 just show up. Yeah, it's steep, but I get it. He's not an Uber driver. It's an hour, it's a two-hour drive. So I get home, and he was gone.

I said, so I asked Robin, what happened? She's like, I don't even know. Like, he came in. We went downstairs. He like literally almost fell down the steps. It was like really awkward. He went to the bathroom and then he came downstairs. I'm like, wait, did he take a dump?

And she's like, I don't know. What? That's not the point. She was, he came downstairs. He looked at it and he said, you need a new Navian, a new system. I'm like, oh, what? Really? Like, how much is that?

$8,000. Like, you got to be kidding me. And how much was it? She goes, yeah, it was $425 plus tax, whatever it was. So I called for a second opinion. We went on the Facebook local moms group and found a trustworthy guy. And he came in and he was like, and because I went on Chachibati, I'm taking pictures. And the chat chip deep tea told me it is, it is not a Navian issue.

He said it's too, it's too small a unit for your house. It was not a Navian issue. So we found the guy. He came in. He did the work. The pipes were flown to the wrong direction. the, what, it doesn't matter. And he fixed it, okay? So now my house is warm. And I'm thinking like, I am such a jackass. Like, this feels so much better. My bathroom is not icicles. Like, my feet don't

hurt walking around the house. I'm torture my kids. What is wrong with me? But anyway, here's the punchline, Ben. So this guy, for $1,000, he was here all day. He literally, like, rewired my copper lines. And now my house is warm. But essentially, the next morning, I went downstairs, and I confirmed, yeah, this guy left the streak. He did take a dump in my, toilet. He came over. He charged me $500 to take a dump in my house and tell me that I need to spend $8,000 on a new unit. Thank you for your service. You charge me $500 to take a dump in my house, and he did nothing. So that's because they know most people won't get a second opinion. Get yourself somebody you trust is I think what I'm trying to say here. That's true. Can I say one thing

on the, on the flip side of housing heat? How great are new cars in the sense of, of they they heat up so fast. Yes. Remember back in the day, my Buick Regal, are you kidding me? My Buick Regal took 45 minutes to get warm. Plus the preheating option. I have an app on my phone that turns my car on. It's amazing.

Yeah, phenomenal. That's true. All right. We got a lot of emails about the car. And I know we're going late, but whatever. It's too late at this point. We're just, we're going down with the show. We got a lot of emails about the car parking backing in.

Ben is a stickler for this. To me, this was the most reason. email that we got. I would just like to clarify one thing from the recent episode. As someone who backs in the car 90% of the time, I feel I am qualified to discuss this. Ben said people back in the car because it's safer. That is incorrect. People back in to make a quicker departure when it's time to leave.

That's all. I take the train every day. If I don't back the car in at the parking lot, I'm stuck for 15 minutes at the end of the day because nobody will let me back out of my space to leave. Bingo, ding, ding, ding, ding. Now, I don't have that luxury. I'll get a ticket. This guy's absolutely right.

If you're in a train station, nobody's letting you back out. He also said, I will say, if someone is right behind me, I will not look back and make them wait. I'll either pull in head first or loop around again. So this guy's a gentleman. All right. Fair? Fair? Okay.

Although, no way, you just, you do nose out. You back out until someone lets you out. You keep going. It's Russian roulette. But how does he get out from going straight? He can get up going straight, so he's got to go back too. No, because you back, you get back to get out. It's different.

All right. All right. we got a lot of emails about the car thing. And somebody was team people who back and suck. And he also, I want to give this guy credit. He also wrote a list of people who suck. Did you read this list? No, I didn't.

Now, I don't like to be like a, I don't like to like paint people with such broad brush. Like, oh, these people suck because that's just, it's nasty, it's negative. But I got to say, this is a good list. And I don't think there's a lot of wiggle room here. I think these people genuinely suck. All right. So here we go.

People who suck lists. They trademark this. So don't steal it. people who do anything other than patiently deplane. True. Fair. People who with signs in the yard asking dogs not to pee there. People who say,

welcome to the club to celebrate someone else's achieving a big day. Runners who run on the street instead of the sidewalk. It's a bit harsh. What's wrong with running on the street? All right. Anyway, people with baby on board stickers. It's look at me culture. I don't know about that.

That seems a bit extreme. I think they're just trying to say, you know, don't hit me. I have a baby in here. But whatever. people, all right, people that use bumper buddies, people that straddle the line to take up two parking spots, people who wear sneakers with suits,

people who wear pajamas in public, people who take their dogs where dogs don't belong, grocery store, busy places, outdoor concerts, people who back into spots while holding up other people. People have Instagrams for their dogs, and finally, people who bag their dogs, poops, only to leave it in the woods or on a trail anywhere other than the trash. So I'd say this is like a 97% approval list of people who suck.

I don't know what bumper buddies are. it's a city thing it's like you put a piece of rubber in your trunk and you put it it like lays on on your bumper so that if somebody I don't know why those people are,

that's all right here's a person that sucks the guy who fake so let's say that you're coming to the you're on the corner there's a red light you pull into the gas station you pull through

but you do the fake I'm gonna like pull up to the gas tank and then I change my own just to keep driving you know that guy that's a good move You do that move. Let's be honest.

Let's be honest. We all do that move. We have a gas station by our house that it's perfect for it. It's just it saves you like a turnaround. So let me ask you a question. Why fake it? Why not just drive straight through? I drive straight through.

I don't fake. I don't do the fake. Okay. All right. So I've faked in my past. I admit I have a cop I'd fake. I wouldn't fake. All right.

So yesterday, Robin calls me at 540. She texts me all caps. You have to leave now. I was like, oh shit. I have to get Logan at 545. So I leave my house and I noticed my neighbor. He's been behind me the whole time. As soon as I leave him in my house, he's on my tail.

And he's following me. He's not literally following me, but we're going to the same place apparently. So I get to Merrick Avenue. He pulls into the gas station and I cut straight through the gas station. And he did the fake, the fake. So I saw him and I was reminded of that move. That's a good move. It's a lame move.

You don't need to fake. There's no eye in the sky looking at you. Just do it. Just cut there. All, let's do recommendations. I took my son George to see Avatar Fire and Ash. We had a Sunday free for sports for once in our life, and he really wants to see Avatar.

And I'm like, man, it's like three hours and 20 minutes. It's very long. And here's my take on Avatar. Avatar is a Zach Bryan of movies. I don't think you're a Zach Bryan fan. He puts out a new album like once every five months. And the big complaint for most people is all his songs sound the same. But his other songs, his previous songs are good.

So the new ones that sound the same are also good. It's just they're just like the other ones. That's Avatar. I felt like this was an 80% carbon copy of the last movie. Correct. It was the same bad guys. It was the same bad guys. It was the same.

It felt like the same. I mean, the action scenes are amazing. I can't. His, his, um, CGI is two to three times better than any other movie. How, right? It's a magic. I don't understand how it looks so good.

Sometimes it looks like a video game still, but most of the time, it's like, how is this looking so good? So I enjoyed it. My son loved it. I was kind of a little bored in the first half of the movie. I thought the last half, the action was amazing. So, come on.

so much fun. It's just, but it, it felt like a, it felt a lot like the second movie. Like, I don't think I need another one. No, I, I'm good. I don't need to see another one. I will, I don't think there will be another one. It's too much. It's enough already. Yeah. Will, was George, like, so excited when he left. Oh, he was like clapping every time it's like, oh, oh, like, he absolutely loved it. I can't believe he sat for three hours for it. One of the better books I've read in a while. This should be an Apple TV series. It's called Replay by Ken Grimwood. I don't know if someone on Twitter said, hey, give me books can't put down. Fiction. And this is a movie, this is a story about a guy who dies at age 50

and wakes up and he's 18 years old again. And he lives his life again. Then he dies and ends up at 18 again. And it's all the different choices he can make in life to become rich or to find his old lost love or it's really, really good. One of the best page turners I've read in a while. Hmm. Not a new concept. I'm surprised it was, uh, it was written in the 80s. I think a lot of people stole from his concept. His, I think, yes, he was original. Yes. He was, It came out like 1986, and I was like, oh my gosh, so many movies have stolen from this guy. Butterfly Effect? Yeah.

So I watched this movie on Apple called All of You. And it was written by Brett Goldstein, who plays Roy Kent on Ted Lasso. Did you ever watch Ted Lasso? I can remember. The first season. Okay. So it's a romantic movie, and it's about, like, people who, you know, friends in college should have got together. They never did.

And it's actually like, it's like a 6.5 movie. It's relatively good. You wouldn't like it. It's a romantic movie. But it was good. Like these two people who were soulmates and they never could find each other. Didn't make it work.

One of them got married, one of them didn't, whatever. But I was looking at Apple. And there's, Apple is a place you go for movies that just no one knows exists. I was scrolling through their movies. There's a movie there on Apple.

With Denzel, there's a Jennifer Lawrence movie. There's a Chris Evans movie. There's that Clooney and Pitt movie, the Damon Neff and Casey Affleck movie. There's a Tom Hanks movie. There's a Matthew Conahey movie. No one ever taught,

no one has ever in the history of the world talked about any of these movies before. and they just exist on Apple. Well, you know why? Because they all stink. The Denzel Spikely movie one, like it was watchable, whatever, it was fine. The, the Clooney...

Wait, what was it? I like the Clooney... The Wolves. I kind of like that one. Which was that? The Wolves? Yeah. They were like hit men.

I kind of liked that one. The other ones, it's like, I can't believe these movies exist. Yeah. No one never talks about them. Okay. What do you got? I watched Freebert,

and I loved it. It's Bert Kreischer, who I don't know that I care for his stand-up, but I think he's got a great vibe energy to him. He's just a very likable guy. It's six episodes,

and it's hilarious. I like that, okay. It's so, I thought it was so funny. He's got two daughters, and they're in private school, and it's about, like, being involved with the drama

of rich dumbasses. I think it's kind of based on his own life, I think. It was so funny. Okay. And like I said, it's 27-minute episodes. Highly recommend.

Highly recommend. I went to the movie theaters finally to see Send Help, the new Sam Ramey movie with Rachel McAdams and what's his name. I don't know what his name is. Unbelievable. One of the best movies I've seen in a long time. She was so good. It was so much fun.

It's like a black humor castaway. Okay. Interesting. I didn't think it was part. It was so funny. And this is why I love going to the theater. theater because there was multiple laugh out louds in the theater where people were laughing together. If you're watching on your couch, you may be chuckle. Maybe you smart. Maybe not even chuckle.

You just go, hmm, that was funny. But with people, you laugh because laughter is contagious. So yeah, send help. If you're at all interested in theaters, amazing, amazing movie. All right, industry. I know you don't watch it anymore, but I think industry is my favorite show on TV. It keeps getting better. It keeps getting better. Listen, it's in the fourth season for a reason. Like, that's, that's a, that's a long-running show. And it is so, it, they, boy, do they push the envelope. There's nothing like it on TV. The sexual escapades are wild.

And it's just a great show, I think. I showed Kobe first kid. Remember that movie? Mm-hmm. What happened to, it's on, this is a Disney movie back in the day? And what happened to Sinbad? Now, I'll tell you, I googled it. So Sinbad was a, was an awesome comedian back in the day or awesome.

I don't know. When I was six years old, I thought it was hilarious. I never saw a stand-in-up, but like he was, he was, he was just funny, he was a funny guy. He was an artifact of the 90s. He was the kind of guy who could only exist in the 90s. Okay, why do you say that? Because it was just the perfect decade for a guy like him. We watched Jingle all the way with my kids this year.

He was in that too. Okay. So it turns out that he's sick now, but he just, his career just died. And I don't really know that there was anything. I'm sure there's stories that we don't know about, like behind the scenes type of stuff, but he was huge. And then he, overnight seemed to disappear. I think he kind of ran its course.

for what he should have been. Okay. All right. And then just to close with the nobody knows anything. So I feel like we've spoken about this in the past. But they said like every time out it's a guess. Like every time, like nobody knows what's going to hit or not. Everybody passed on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That's hilarious. Except for Paramount. Like freaking Lucas and Spielberg and everybody was like, no. That's really surprising. given the success of Star Wars. And Jaws. And Jaws. Yeah.

Like they had, they had cachet at the time. And, and it's one of the biggest independent movies of all time. The greatest action franchise ever. I, uh, probably,

I mean, yeah. Certainly on the up there. All right. An hour and 26 minutes. I blame, uh, I blame what we open the show with. It's too much.

We're drowning. Yep. More than ever. All right. Thank you for sticking with us. Animal spirits at the compound. News.com. See you next time.